This was from the foreword of the The Art and Making of The Dark Knight Trilogy book:

Alfred. Gordon. Lucius. Bruce . . . Wayne. Names that have come to mean so much to me. Today, I’m three weeks from saying a final good-bye to these characters and their world. It’s my son’s ninth birthday. He was born as the Tumbler was being glued together in my garage from random parts of model kits. Much time, many changes. A shift from sets where some gunplay or a helicopter were extraordinary events to working days where crowds of extras, building demolitions, or mayhem thousands of feet in the air have become familiar.

People ask if we’d always planned a trilogy. This is like being asked whether you had planned on growing up, getting married, having kids. The answer is complicated. When David and I first started cracking open Bruce’s story, we flirted with what might come after, then backed away, not wanting to look too deep into the future. I didn’t want to know everything that Bruce couldn’t; I wanted to live it with him. I told David and Jonah to put everything they knew into each film as we made it. The entire cast and crew put all they had into the first film. Nothing held back. Nothing saved for next time. They built an entire city. Then Christian and Michael and Gary and Morgan and Liam and Cillian started living in it. Christian bit off a big chunk of Bruce Wayne’s life and made it utterly compelling. He took us into a pop icon’s mind and never let us notice for an instant the fanciful nature of Bruce’s methods.

I never thought we’d do a second—how many good sequels are there? Why roll those dice? But once I knew where it would take Bruce, and when I started to see glimpses of the antagonist, it became essential. We re-assembled the team and went back to Gotham. It had changed in three years. Bigger. More real. More modern. And a new force of chaos was coming to the fore. The ultimate scary clown, as brought to terrifying life by Heath. We’d held nothing back, but there were things we hadn’t been able to do the first time out—a Batsuit with a flexible neck, shooting on Imax. And things we’d chickened out on—destroying the Batmobile, burning up the villain’s blood money to show a complete disregard for conventional motivation. We took the supposed security of a sequel as license to throw caution to the wind and headed for the darkest corners of Gotham.

I never thought we’d do a third—are there any great second sequels? But I kept wondering about the end of Bruce’s journey, and once David and I discovered it, I had to see it for myself. We had come back to what we had barely dared whisper about in those first days in my garage. We had been making a trilogy. I called everyone back together for another tour of Gotham. Four years later, it was still there. It even seemed a little cleaner, a little more polished. Wayne Manor had been rebuilt. Familiar faces were back—a little older, a little wiser . . . but not all was as it seemed.

Gotham was rotting away at its foundations. A new evil bubbling up from beneath. Bruce had thought Batman was not needed anymore, but Bruce was wrong, just as I had been wrong. The Batman had to come back. I suppose he always will.

Michael, Morgan, Gary, Cillian, Liam, Heath, Christian . . . Bale. Names that have come to mean so much to me. My time in Gotham, looking after one of the greatest and most enduring figures in pop culture, has been the most challenging and rewarding experience a filmmaker could hope for. I will miss the Batman. I like to think that he’ll miss me, but he’s never been particularly sentimental.

"Gotham was rotting away at its foundations. A new evil bubbling up from beneath. Bruce had thought Batman was not needed anymore, but Bruce was wrong, just as I had been wrong. The Batman had to come back. I suppose he always will."

Interesting thought Nolan.

__________________"One swerve of the tongue can pierce you like a sword through the lung..."

A goodbye and a sincere thank you is in order for Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan, Emma Thomas, David Goyer, Wally Pfister, Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard, Charles Roven and Lee Smith. Without them, The Dark Knight Trilogy would have never materialized.

A goodbye and a sincere thank you is in order for Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan, Emma Thomas, David Goyer, Wally Pfister, Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard, Charles Roven and Lee Smith. Without them, The Dark Knight Trilogy would have never materialized.

Don't forget Lindy Hemming, who designed the costumes for all three films. Chris Corbould for SFX, and Nathan Crowley for set designs.

I think most rational Batman fans will forever be grateful to you [Chris]. So from the bottom of my heart, thank you again, and I long to see return soon. I wish you all the best. Have a great well-deserved vacation.

A goodbye and a sincere thank you is in order for Christopher Nolan, Jonathan Nolan, Emma Thomas, David Goyer, Wally Pfister, Hans Zimmer, James Newton Howard, Charles Roven and Lee Smith. Without them, The Dark Knight Trilogy would have never materialized.

Thank you all. It's unfortunate that this trilogy had to come to an end, but nothing lasts forever.

Well put!

They have certainly set the bar pretty high for whomever takes up the challenge to reboot Batman down the road. I think there is only one other trilogy in my collection that I find as satisfying, and those are the man with no name movies by Sergio Leone.

They have certainly set the bar pretty high for whomever takes up the challenge to reboot Batman down the road. I think there is only one other trilogy in my collection that I find as satisfying, and those are the man with no name movies by Sergio Leone.

Indeed. The bar has been set extremely high for next director/franchise. This trilogy will likely go down in cinematic history as the first in the genre to achieve high levels of quality.

It's really pretty amazing... the journey Batman has taken on film. When Schumacher ran the series into the ground, Batman was considered the anthrax of superheroes for a while. Whenever anyone discussed a potential Batman movie again, you'd hear a lot of nipple and codpiece jokes. And rightfully so... Schumacher RUINED Batman and WB just went ahead and LET him.

But then they decided to give it another shot and probably some people were skeptical because even those who had seen Memento weren't totally sure what kind of Batman movie Christopher Nolan would give us. But once he started casting the roles and he gave some interviews on it, I think a lot of us were like, "Yeah. This is him. This is the right guy."

And Batman Begins proved that. While it might forever live in the shadow of The Dark Knight, I don't think we should downplay just how much of a milestone that film was, because it was the first Batman film EVER that truly explored Bruce Wayne and Batman as a character. Burton tried a little bit in Batman '89, but he clearly was more interested in the Joker and pandering to Nicholson's ego (and don't give me that crap about how he was "brilliantly decentralizing the hero").

Then of course came TDK and what an amazing film it was. Anyone who wasn't on board before that one certainly was afterward. And now TDKR is an amazing conclusion and possibly (at least to some of us) the best film in the series.

And now, here we are, in the golden age of comic book movies. And while I loved The Avengers, Captain America, X-Men: First Class and plenty of other films in the genre... there's really only one series that reigns supreme, and that's Batman. We can criticize DC and WB all we want for their missteps over the years, but we should also be happy that they let Nolan do his thing and create the greatest superhero trilogy of all time.

This is why I say it's the ballot or the bullet.
It's liberty or it's death.
It's freedom for everybody or freedom for nobody.
America today finds herself in a unique situation... to become involved in a bloodless revolution